Children play at the Chinatown YMCA, which opened a rebuilt community center in 2010. The Y serves as a bridge between the Chinese community and American culture. Older members of the community, who remember when Chinese people were restricted to the area, raised a substantial share of the $22 million cost.

Photo: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

Children play at the Chinatown YMCA, which opened a rebuilt...

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Carl Nolte, general assignment reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, poses for a portrait on Tuesday July 1, 2008 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chroncle

Carl Nolte, general assignment reporter for the San Francisco...

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A chinese decoration hanging in the halls of the YMCA in Chinatown on February 22, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

A chinese decoration hanging in the halls of the YMCA in Chinatown...

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Children raise their hand for a crayon while doing an art project at the YMCA in Chinatown on February 22, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

Children raise their hand for a crayon while doing an art project...

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The YMCA in Chinatown on Sacramento St. on February 22, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

The YMCA in Chinatown on Sacramento St. on February 22, 2013 in San...

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Andre, Jimmy, and Johnson playing basketball at the YMCA in Chinatown on February 22, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Jessica Olthof, The Chronicle

Andre, Jimmy, and Johnson playing basketball at the YMCA in...

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A girl holds up a heart made out of crayons that she made at the YMCA in Chinatown on February 22, 2013 in San Francisco, Calif.

Ford Lee is a longtime San Franciscan, gray hair, a grandfather. He's from the old school - the now defunct High School of Commerce on Van Ness Avenue. He is a UC Berkeley alumnus, a retired electrical engineer and teacher. He grew up in Chinatown and has spent a lifetime as a volunteer at the Chinatown YMCA on Sacramento Street. "I'm an old Y boy," he proudly said.

Lee was talking the other afternoon about a girl the organization helped.

Her parents had died and she lived in a single room, 20 feet by 20 feet, with a brother, a sister and her grandmother. The bathroom was down the hall, shared with other families. Her home in Chinatown was on an important street, upstairs. The three kids and the old lady slept in bunk beds. Not exactly the American dream.

"She was 12 years old and never had a birthday party," Lee said. "She had never gotten a Christmas present in her life."

So the Y arranged a party for her, with a cake, candles and a tiara for the birthday girl. She was a princess for a day.

The girl's story sounds like something out of another century, but it happened only five years ago. The girl is in her last year of high school and has been accepted at college. She became part of a mentoring program at the Y. "She's part of our family now," Lee said.

The girl who never had a birthday party is not unusual in the complex world of Chinatown, which is both a culturally rich community at the start of a new year and a desperately poor one. "Fifty four percent of the people in Chinatown live in poverty," said Kari Lee, executive director of the Chinatown Y. Many of them live in a single room. "This is a very densely populated neighborhood," she said.

Chinatown, with its familiar language, its restaurants, its markets, its street life, is often the first stop for immigrants from China. It is an old community in many ways: The Chinese neighborhood dates back at least 150 years. But it is new, too, a very different place than the Chinatown Ford Lee and his neighbors knew.

"It was like a small town," said Milly Lee, another Y stalwart. "Everybody knew everybody."

"In the '40s," said Ford Lee, "We were all American-born kids in Chinatown," all native sons and daughters. "Nobody left Chinatown."

There was a reason for that. Until the 1950s, Chinese were not permitted to live west of Larkin Street. There was another rigid line at Broadway. Chinese people did not go into North Beach.

When the Chinatown Y opened, it was a sensation: a place for recreation, a place to swim. "We were not allowed to swim in the YMCA downtown," Milly Lee said.

The Y was a place to go in the most urban of San Francisco neighborhoods. "A home away from home," Ford Lee called it. He signed up when he was 13 years old and never left. His family is involved too, including his wife, his children and grandchildren. Kari Lee is his daughter.

It is a new world now; that goes without saying. But still there is a cultural wall around Chinatown. Many of the new immigrants and the old foreign-born people live in a separate San Francisco.

So the Chinatown Y serves both worlds: the kids who never had a birthday party or who have never been to a baseball game or seen the ocean, and the kids who go camping with the Y, work out in the fitness center, learn ballet, play basketball and have a thousand friends on Facebook.

The Chinatown Y opened a completely rebuilt community center in 2010. It incorporated the old gate entrance to the new building, a nod to the past.

Older members of the community, nearly all of them now living outside Chinatown, raised a substantial share of the $22 million cost of the new Chinatown Y. They also volunteer their time as everything from camp counselors to cooks. "The Y was an important place for us," Ford Lee said, "We wanted to pay something back."